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IBM Saves $250M Running Linux On Mainframes
coondoggie writes "Today IBM will announce it is consolidating nearly 4,000 small computer servers in six locations onto about 30 refrigerator-sized mainframes running Linux, saving $250 million in the process. The 4,000 replaced servers will be recycled by IBM Global Asset Recovery Services. The six data centers currently take up over 8 million square feet, or the size of nearly 140 football fields."
The article says that the data centers required for the 4000 "small computer servers" aggregate to about 8 million square feet. It takes IBM 2000 square feet to house a small computer? Also, saving $250 million suggests that it costs them something over $60K per "small computer" even ignoring the price of the new mainframes. Amazing.
My employer recently 'consolidated' their server farm too. We used to have a room with fifty aging Dell PowerEdge servers, each running independently, requiring massive support, cooling, and electricity.
Now we have ten VM servers running all the migrated services, PLUS a room with about fifty aging Dell PowerEdge servers, each running independently, requiring massive support, cooling, and electricity.
I never thought 'consolidation' would require so much more space, electricity, air conditioning, and upgrades to core switches and UPS units.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
It's kinda hard to find technical specifications on these mainframes beyond marketing fluff. After some looking I found this brochure, which has some interesting information on the firmware and a few details of the I/O, but not much about the processing units, and why one of these would be able to replace 133 blade servers. It does mention up to 30 superscalar processors per box, but I'm not really sure what that means. (Maybe they go next to the inverting flux capacitor).
- Nothing to see hear.
Saving a lot of dough by using Linux on servers makes sense, heck it's fairly obvious to anyone here, that's where it excels.
I think Slashdotters would be more interested in stories that focus on a company switching its desktops to Linux though. Servers running Linux are pretty common. We want news about the desktop front; it would be more newsworthy at least.
I had to maintain some software that was running on a aging 370 mainframe. The 370 was emulating a 360 which was emulating a 1401.
It was pension and payroll software and it was legally blessed.
It was such a frigging song and dance trying to get anything done that it was cheaper and faster for the company to emulate their butts off rather than trying to go through the management and the unions and the employees.
But I did learn about optimizing instruction fetches by scattering the compiled code around the circumference of a magnetic drum so that the drum would have rotated around beneath the read head in time for the next instruction.
Try and tell that to the young people of today, and they wont believe you, eh Obadiah?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I have seen applications that are well written, understood and maintained and are 30 years old. I suffered through the rewrite of a well known, commercial revision control application we used to maintain our code. Originally in C, it was rewritten in Java with horrible results. Our checkout times went from a few minutes to 10 minutes for a full checkout. All our custom tools no longer worked, but the interface looked fabulous. Frankly, I'll take a text console based application over some bloated "modern age" crapware any day.
depends on the database behind that 30 year old software for me. I've seen extremely flat databases with nothing but a text console wrapped around it. Extremely, poor integrity standards and the data falls apart like a stack of Jenga blocks (the more people playing the quicker it falls). Computers back then were (often) used to supplement paper systems and sometimes it really shows.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Where I work we currently run two mainframes in a sysplex environment for all the core transactions. It's a very optimized environment and handles millions of financial transactions a day. In mid-2006, IBM started giving us zLinux engines to "try out" and they gave us all of the software we needed to make a go of it. Kind of like a playground drug dealer, they hoped that by giving us a bit for free we'd get hooked and become dedicated customers. The problem was, for the type of workload that typically runs on our servers (high CPU, moderate I/O) we were experiencing poor performance on the mainframe VMs. IBM sent all their engineers out to help make tweaks and tune all sorts of things. Despite all the tuning and tweaking that took place, we could never get a single engine to perform better than a $5,000 server. Keep in mind that a single engine was retailing for around $80,000 after discounts.
We did some calculations and determined that for the price of a zLinux engine we could buy an entire rack of high-end HP servers that would outperform the single engine by a factor of 200:1. Again, maybe it was just the workload we were doing, but even IBM couldn't figure it out and our server work profile isn't exactly uncommon. Granted you can cram a lot of guests onto a host system provided that none of the guests want to use more than 10% of their CPU at any given time, but that defeats the purpose. I could probably run a VMWare host with 100 guests and call it a success, provided they all sat idle.
It was kind of funny because the IBM engineers would shake their heads and admit that for our workload it just wasn't going to work out. Then the next week the sales guy would call and ask if we were ready to buy that third mainframe since he just read the engineer's report and our visit was obviously a smashing success.
I'm not knocking the whole Linux on the mainframe concept, I'm just sharing our experience and how the whole thing seemed to be like someone in IBM Marketing declared "we need to sell Linux on the mainframe" and the Dilberts were forced to sell a product that worked about as well as a chocolate fireguard. It was a very awkward experience and even the IBM engineers seemed like they were stuck in an uncomfortable position of supporting sales for a product that even moderately demanding customers wouldn't be able to run with.
Personally I consider Linux on the mainframe to be on par with running Linux on an iPhone. Sure you probably can, but does it actually do anything uniquely useful for the business? I have a hard time selling technology to the CIO on the grounds that because it's Linux it's a good business decision regardless of the context.
I still haven't seen any conclusive evidence that Linux on mainframe is a good idea. I'm sure running 30 new mainframes is going to cost less than 4000 aging servers. Just about anything would be less expensive than 4000 aging servers.
But I bet that a small farm of modern medium sized servers running Linux on VMWare would be even less expensive. Or Solaris/Niagara. Why would you want to run an open source operating system, whose major benefits are openness and affordability on the what is literally the most expensive and most proprietary computing platform in the world!
These server consolidation projects are just giant boondoggles spawned because the server sprawl finally got insane. It's an endless cycle:
A. Giant server consolidation project that takes 4000 servers down to 30 servers.
B. Department B complains that Department A's application keeps hanging and consuming all of the CPU. They demand their own hardware "for availability reasons".
C. Vendor C demands dedicated hardware for licensing/capacity planning/supportability reasons. Rather than constantly bicker with the vendor over supportability they get dedicated hardware.
D. Department D complains that the IT department is charging outrageous prices for time sharing on the mainframe. After all a dedicated server only costs $XXX.
E. Suddenly there are 4000 servers again.
F. IT department spends some insane amount of money on infrastructure to manage the 4000 servers.
G. IT department budget gets insanely large trying to manage that much stuff.
H. Some CIO gets the idea that all of this money managing servers is ridiculous and we should do a server consolidation project.
I. IT department spends an even larger amount of money on the latest super high availability gear and consulting services so that the can run 4000 commodity servers inside a few big servers. All because it will "cost less to maintain".
J. Go back to A.
While I agree that IBM's mainframe systems are rock-solid (and, as a colleague is fond of saying, self-healing), accidents *DO* happen. I'm sure the mainframe is happily running its code just fine only seconds before a hurricane rips the roof off of the data center and hurls the machine into the next county....
It's those kinds of things that make disaster recovery necessary. If the apps were distributed across discrete servers, its possible that not all of them would have been destroyed. Remember the end of Twister? The barn was wasted, but the house was left intact.
Before, .33% failure rate = 13 failures a day. You had well understood procedures for dealing with failures.
.33% failure rate = 1 failure per thousand days. This is a recipe for hell.
After,
But wait...
When you do have one machine fail- it takes down 133 virtual servers at the same time. You raised your risk enormously.
IBM will tell you all about fail-over just like they did our executives.
Half the country down for three days is the reality.
---
Still it is interesting to see a return to the centralized mainframe farm. Sure hope those multiply redundant communication lines don't go down.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I recently worked with IBM to interop with sametime (their IM network), and my opinion of their engineering practices would probably get me fired for disparaging a partner.
Yes, 4000 "small computer servers" times 2000 square feet equals 8 million square feet. But this is unlikely the arrangement. Consider instead a few buildings of data centers, each with 1 or more relatively small rooms. Within a room, there may be a few racks, all surrounded by walking space, and other perhipherals like AC units. Then outside of those rooms, more walking space for hallways. When you factor in all the human space and simple space for ventilation, and then cubicles and monitoring for support personnel it could average around 2000 square feet (40x50).
The same logic can be applied to costs.. $250 million / 4000 machines = $62.5K. Some of that is actual hardware, and software licenses. Some of that is ongoing support from their full time employees on staff to maintain the things.
There are 10 types of cliches in this world. Those that are new, and those that aren't.
"The six data centers currently take up over 8 million square feet, or the size of nearly 140 football fields."
I suppose when the US finally goes metric, they'll have to deal with units of area such as "millifields", "centifields" and "kilofields". In time, the measure will have to formalised e.g. "the distance a 100kg, 190cm man is able to kick a leather-encased rubber bladder...".
Or maybe the current generation of writers that thinks "140 football fields" is a meaningful substitute for "a really big chunk of space" will have died off by then.
IBM is a hardware company, always has been, they've been into open source software since before GNU existed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing)
Sure, they are an evil corporation with too much money on retainer, but they realized long ago, that software has an intrinsic value that crashes once the software is written.
For instance, the labor theory of value - the most influential of the intrinsic theories - holds that the value of an item comes from the amount of labor spent producing said item.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_v alue
Basically, once software is written, it's value rapidly approaches zero, because the ability to replicate that work is well within the skill levels of the neophyte. IBM conceded the value of software long before Bill Gates came around floating the idea that the value of software could be upheld by government interference, essentially creating a new fiat currency, and entering the business of printing money, they hired lawyers to back it up along with becoming an extremely predatory business entity.
While IBM may have quite a bit to lose going the free software route they have a lot more to gain. Once they own all the copyrights/patents they can do whatever they want and that (currently) includes GPLvX or greater.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Well, this has been the first /. flooding I've ever witnessed...
It is rather interesting that you should flood flood like you do, then bemoan cultural intolerance... I participate in a forum where several users (or "morons", as I dub them) demand and exercise their "right to flood", claiming that cleaning up their flood is denying them their right to free speech.
I just don't understand how do you find the time to do things like that...
Ignore this signature. By order.
Actually, on a System z9 EC (Enterprise Class), a single CPU chip failure is not a "Call Home" repair event. Only the second CPU chip failure would result in an automatic call, while your business keeps running of course. (There are a minimum of two spares in each machine.) The average time to first failure for a particular machine is somewhere in the many decades range.
OK, just for fun (because it never actually happens in the real world), what happens with a triple failure? If you happen to have a "fully configured" mainframe -- all processors turned on -- then.... your business still keeps running. Yes, the system might lose some processing capacity, but it keeps running. The higher priority stuff (from a business view) takes precedence automatically, and life goes on. This is all on a single machine still.
If you've got an S18, S28, S38, or S54 model, then, at your business's convenience, the faulty hardware can be replaced. (You might do this at night, for example.) The repair technician tells the mainframe to "evacuate" memory on a portion of the machine while the OS and applications keep chugging along, possibly with reduced capacity, often not. (Depends on what configuration you choose.) When the evacuation is complete, the technician can pull a processor/memory group (called a "book"), insert the new one, bring the new one online, and... everything still keeps running. Again, this is all on a single machine -- no clusters required for any of this.